Picasso sculpture exhibition opens in US
Cubist guitars, sheet metal violins and female busts with disproportionate eyes: the largest exhibition of Picasso sculptures in half a century, in the US, opens in New York today.
Spread across an entire floor at the prestigious Museum of Modern Art, the exhibition of 140 works spans 60 years of Pablo Picasso’s prodigious and immensely varied output, from 1902 to 1964.
“Sometimes it’s hard to believe that it is the same artist from one gallery to the next,” said curator Ann Temkin.
For many in New York and the US, the exhibition entitled “Picasso Sculpture” may be a once in a lifetime opportunity to see the enormity of the Spanish artist’s sculptures, in one place, as it runs through to Feb 7 of next year.
Many of the pieces are on loan from public and private collections, both in America and abroad, particularly the Musée National Picasso in Paris, which has provided about a third of the collection.
“There were numerous critical loans that made this exhibition possible,” acknowledged Glenn Lowry, director of MoMA.
The work stretches from Picasso’s first works in bronze, wood and plaster, to painted sheet metal from 19541964, his Cubist period, pre-war years in France, World War II and his life afterwards on the French Riviera.
But if Picasso lived until his death in 1973 as one of the recognised great masters of 20th century painting, his sculptures remained largely hidden from view during his lifetime, said curator Anne Umland.
“Picasso kept his sculptures with him throughout his life,” she said.
“It’s really only at the time of his death that Picasso sculptures as a group began their journey out of the studio to public and private collections in the world.”
MoMA quickly became interested in acquiring the works so the museum now has the most comprehensive collection of Picasso sculptures outside of the Picasso museum in Paris. Its collection covers all the hallmarks of Picasso, including Cubist musical instruments and women with disproportionate faces.
But it also includes lesser-known sculptures such as the 1941 bronze Death’s Head and The Monument to Apollinaire created in the late 1920s for a contest to construct the tomb of his friend, French writer Guillaume Apollinaire, none of which were accepted.
The exhibition also includes what Temkin calls a “miracle” — a set of six Glass Of Absinthe in painted bronze created in 1914 and which dispersed shortly after Europe was flung into the horrors of WWII.
Temkin said a visit to the Ethnographic Museum in Paris in 1907 had been hugely influential on Picasso’s artistic development.
There he discovered sculptures, figures and masks from Oceania and Africa and in Temkin’s words, realised “wow, here there are sculptures that kind of have a magical presence, a sort of charisma”. She said sculpture suited his “restless and impatient” temperament as it allowed him to stop and start and return to work at any time and take as long as he wanted, unlike painting which requires more preparation.